I assume any used AMD card has been mining to oblivion and back, unless I personally know the owner. I do assume the same for GTX 1070 and 1080. Heck, last summer I bought 2 used low profile 1050Ti's that were used to mine!

While a 1 year card used to mine might be ok, I wouldn't touch any R9 series. They are old, hot, loud, power hungry, and bulky. Funny thing, I had a 280X mining for some time to donate to various projects, most of it went to Linux Mint.

Also a small P.S: the GT 730 being "bad" or not doesn't matter, is what the OP have and I enjoyed the threads about his/her gaming experience on it! :D

100% what I think as well. Would not touch such a used card, especially if it is destined to be my main graphics card for years to come.

It's definitely not bad! I have played many great games and it delivered those pixels without complaining (too much at least)!

:D
Right? Completely wrong time for going graphics shopping.

Well there will be loads that are simply gaming cards. If it works he'll get much better performance for his money. Are mining cards always that bad?

If the miner knows what he's doing and undervolts them it puts the card under less stress.

If you buy from CEX you can get second hand cards with a guarantee

I would just wait if you can. I bought a RX Vega 56 8GB a year ago for 165 Euros, and I sold it today for 400. That's probably a good indicator of the current state of GPU-prices.

I guess one can either laugh or cry about these kind of things :)...

Some cards will even undervolt themselves a little by design, or at least not boost as much when running any compute workload. So no, they're not always bad, but it can still be a lottery. It's only worth it if you can get much cheaper cards IMHO, and that's like not possible at the moment.

well i did not expect empty online shelves

My experience was as follows:
a) Everything reasonably decent (mid-high tier) out of stock
b) $3000 watercooled RGB 3090s - only 2 left in stock
c) Few mid to low range cards at 2x or 3x the price

At least you didn't have to walk kilometers to only find empty shelves :)

Wait it out for a few months. There is currently a dearth of graphic cards. To put it into perspective, I bought the RX 570 three years ago for less than €200. Now, it's double that price.

If you are going for a new PC later on, I'd advise against spending too much on a card for your current PC. A good idea would be to get a 1050 Ti (or similarly-powerful card) for less than €150.